[The thing, though, is that South Sudan is actually pretty ethnically diverse. South Sudan, like a number of other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and particularly this region of it, is articulated by borders that have very little to do with the actual people there. The earlier, unified version of Sudan had been carved out, in part, by European and especially British colonialism. The long-running conflict between the country's north and its south was, like many wars in post-colonial Africa, partly a consequence of European cartographers having forced disparate groups into artificial borders. Splitting Sudan in two helped to ease the tension created by these borders, but they didn't solve it. The ethnic groups had been united by a common enemy – the north – but that's no longer bringing them together.]
By Max Fisher
 |
(Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)
Displaced civilians take shelter at the United Nations mission in South Sudan. |
It was considered one of
the world's great successes when, on July 9, 2011, South Sudan became an
independent nation. After many unhappy years as a region of Sudan, the new
country declared its independence with crucial support from the outside world,
particularly the United States.
Now, less than two and a
half years later, South Sudan appears to be on the verge of a potential civil war. Since an
alleged coup attempt Dec. 15 (it probably wasn't really a coup), fighting
between rebels and government forces has killed at least 500, injured four U.S.
troops and left entire cities disputed. As of this writing, the South Sudan
army says it's preparing to attackrebel groups who've taken
control of oil-producing regions. How did this happen?
The roots of South
Sudan's conflict extend back much further than the country's 2011 independence.
And, while all internal conflicts are complicated, this one is especially so.
But you might say that, in the most general terms, there are three big forces
driving the conflict: (1) South Sudan is very poor and underdeveloped, and
resource scarcity tends to fracture politics and exacerbate ethnic conflict;
(2) The same forces that helped South Sudan win independence – militias,
strongly felt tribal identities – also set it up for today's conflict; (3) More
narrowly, the country's president had fired the vice president, starting a
political dispute that may have been the match to South Sudan's tinderbox.
Let's go through those
one by one.
(1) South Sudan's
poverty exacerbates its ethnic divides
To be clear, it's not
that being poor in itself makes a country prone to conflict: the problem is
when resources are scarce and there isn't a good system for distributing them.
That forces people to compete for resources. And that competition can cause
social divides to widen. In South Sudan's case, the divides are ethnic. Or
rather, they began as ethnic and have since become political.
South Sudan is
especially susceptible to this problem because its economy is a very unlucky
mix of poor people, a poor state and rich resources. South Sudan's GDP per
capita is about $1,000, one of the lowest in the world. Its infrastructure is
practically non-existent, with only a few dozen miles of paved road across a
nation the size of Texas. But the country has an awful lot of oil. That means
that South Sudan is poor in ways that make people more likely to compete for
resources, because individuals don't have very much, but the country is also
rich in ways that make people more likely to compete, in this case for control
over the oil.
This has created some
very fertile economic conditions for internal conflict. But it gets worse.
(2) The country's path
to independence was also a path to internal conflict
The decades before South
Sudan's independence are complicated but, in the simplest terms, it was defined
by a half-century of fighting between the politically dominant, ethnically Arab
north and the politically weaker, ethnically sub-Saharan south. Rebel groups in
the south wanted more autonomy from the north. They had to fight very hard to
get it (although they owe a lot to the north, which behaved so terribly that it
galvanized world opinion in favor of the south).
The thing, though, is
that South Sudan is actually pretty ethnically diverse. South Sudan, like a
number of other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and particularly this region of
it, is articulated by borders that have very little to do with the actual
people there. The earlier, unified version of Sudan had been carved out, in
part, by European and especially British colonialism. The long-running conflict
between the country's north and its south was, like many wars in post-colonial
Africa, partly a consequence of European cartographers having forced disparate
groups into artificial borders. Splitting Sudan in two helped to ease the
tension created by these borders, but they didn't solve it. The ethnic groups
had been united by a common enemy – the north – but that's no longer bringing
them together.
People in South Sudan don't
identify that strongly with their nationality: the idea of South Sudan is too
new for most people to have internalized it as their national identity, and the
old unified Sudan was too hated and in any case too artificial. So people have
defaulted to an ethnic or tribal identity. That's fine, people can identify
however they want, but because of all that resource competition, it makes it
that much tougher for everyone to come together for "South Sudan" if
they care a lot more about their fellow Dinka or Nuer. (To be clear, that
doesn't mean the ethnic groups are unified – they're not – but people still
tend to group ethnically.)
The country's
demographic composition is just about right for people to divide violently
along ethnic lines. The largest group, the Dinka, only makes up about 15
percent of the population. The next-largest, the Nuer, are about 10 percent.
There are dozens of other ethnic groups that speak dozens of languages. As
Stephen Saideman, a political scientist who studies ethnic conflict,wrote this year, "In societies that have
very little diversity, there is no opportunity for [ethnic] violence. For
societies where there is a great deal, there is no threat of dominance. But in
places where there are a few groups that rival each other, then the threats
they pose to each other or at least one to the others can be severe. Ethnic violence
may not be about fractionalization/diversity but about polarization."
So, in South Sudan, you
previously had lots of ethnic groups organizing along ethnic lines so that they
could come together (if imperfectly and inconsistently) to fight the north. Now
they've lost that unifying enemy but still have the ethnic organization, and
are being pushed toward competition by the economic conditions we talked about
earlier. Worse, South Sudan's history of the last few decades has been one
where the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence; militias have had a lot of
that power. So it's much easier for people to resort to militia as a sort of
default, making it much more likely for political or ethnic disputes to turn
violent.
(3) A political rivalry
that became ethnic
This is where we get
into this week's conflict. The president since independence, Salva Kiir, is
ethnic Dinka. His now-former vice president, Riek Machar, is Nuer. But Kiir saw
Machar as a rival – probably with some reason – and fired him in July. You can
probably guess where things went from there.
If this were, say,
Iceland, then a contentious and controversial rivalry between the nation's two
leading politicians would probably be seen as mostly just political infighting,
or at most perhaps a clashing of political parties or ideologies. But Kiir and
Machar are the two most powerful people from their ethnic groups in a country
where ethnic grouping is very important. So a fight between those two men was
bound to exacerbate tension between their respective ethnic groups, which also
have lots of other people in positions of power.
On Dec. 15, some
soldiers loyal to Kiir clashed with soldiers loyal to Machar. (Think back to
the part above, about ethnic fractionalization; South Sudan is one of many
countries where people are expected to feel loyal to their country as well as
their tribe or ethnicity, something that can obviously cause conflict.) Kiir
accused Machar of trying to stage a coup, although that's probably not what
happened. Since then, fighting between the respective groups has spread, with
forces loyal to Machar now having seized small but significant pieces of
territory.
Eric Reeves, a Smith
College political scientist who studies South Sudan, told my colleague Sudarsan
Raghavan that, given the ethnic diversity within the army, “the events of the
last days were, if not inevitable, all too likely.”
"If not inevitably,
all too likely" is a good description for South Sudan's conflict. To be
absolutely clear, there's nothing inherent to the people of South Sudan that
makes them any more or less prone to conflict than people from any other
countries. But there are certain economic, demographic and political factors
that, in any country, make internal conflict more likely. A significant number
of those factors are present in the world's youngest country, and to a
dangerously high degree. South Sudan is just unlucky.
